Category Archives: Place-based education

Chasing the River, Part 2

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In a previous post, I described a student named David who decided to “chase the river”–more accurately the series of brooks and ponds and rivers–that carried his backyard runoff to the sea.

Many students after David found their own watershed pathways, working with the classroom set of topographic maps and other resources. Our distribution varied, from year to year, but we always had a fair number of students who lived in the school’s own watershed, the Blackstone River watershed, along with many from the Sudbury, Assabet, Concord and Nashua sections of the Merrimack watershed to the north, a few from the Charles River watershed, to the east, and a few from the Quinnebaug, to the southwest.

Kids had all sorts of adventures following their watershed pathways, naming nameless brooklets and ponds, asking helpful neighbors what they knew, and playing in the mud.

Once, when we were stumped, I made a house call. Marissa lived on the very top of a hill, typically a watershed boundary. According to the map, her front yard would drain into the Sudbury, and her backyard into the Charles. In actual fact, it all went into the street drains, whose outflow ran into a holding pond, whose outflow ran into the Charles. Not for anything would I have missed that rainy afternoon slogging around in rubber boots, peering down through street drains to be sure which way the water was flowing.

Eventually, with the help of other map freaks, I discovered National Geographic’s Topo software, which let a student use a mouse to trace a pathway on a seamless electronic topographic map, then printed for us the annotated map that resulted. So a student could start with the little trickle that ran across the back of her yard, and keep going, without even needing hip waders or bug repellent. (It’s a shame to miss that entirely, though, and most kids got both experiences: on the map and on the ground.)

Andrew working with Topo cropped

Once a student had done his electronic tracing, he could ask the software for an elevation profile, and see how his pathway was all going downhill, except for a lake or a pond–a long flat stretch–or a place where a hand twitched and the path climbed out of the river briefly. To trace a pathway from brook to pond to river, then flip that path and see it from the side, sliding down the edge of the continent—that was pretty cool.

tracing watershed pathway cropped

If a small group of kids did this together, squeals and screams might erupt from their corner of the classroom, applauding the kid who just kept “sailing” down Narragansett Bay all the way to the open Atlantic. The group above, working with Terry Lunt, parent volunteer extraordinaire, is following the unfamiliar path of a classmate who lives way out in Charlton.

Kids who shared the lower part of their pathways, what they called “the big river,” could meet together and see, for example, how much area was drained, by all their different routes, to become the power of the Blackstone, harnessed for the mills and re-channeled for the canal that gave the Blackstone Valley so much of its identity.

Then what? The maps and their pathways could be put up in the hall for the rest of the school to see.

Topo watershed printouts whole group cropped

Like a dare to everyone passing by: wherever you live, some story like this belongs to you. You can go find out, and you can get started with a map.

Some years, students created posters to share with each other and parents at a special watershed night. Some years, we were even more ambitious, ridiculously ambitious. At the outset of Touchstone’s Older Student Program–supported by a state arts grant and with the help of a wonderful video consultant, Veda Reilly–Katy Aborn and I worked together to create a multi-part video called Voyage to the Sea. Voyage included documentary sections about topics such as the water cycle and water power, as well as story sections about two teams engaged in a regional competition called The Blackstone Watershed Relay.

In the final chapter of the video story, Bill McHenry, then director of Touchstone’s Extended Day Program, posed as the director of the Watershed Protection Association, the fictitious nonprofit that sponsored the equally fictitious relay. Speaking to students who had become fired-up environmentalists as a result of learning about their watersheds, Bill repeated a quote from Bernie McGurl of the Lackawanna River Association, one of thousands of real-life organizations of people who have gathered together to learn about their watersheds and to protect the quality of the water flowing through them.

Water has a voice. It carries a message that tells those downstream who you are and how you care for the land.

Within those words, and within all these connected river-chasing experiences, there are lessons within lessons, like watersheds within watersheds: lessons about the ways learning is grounded and deepened and enriched by attention to place; lessons about everything that flows to us and everything that flows from us, and the responsibilities we share with others and to others; lessons about what we can learn from each others’ small views, flowing together to become a wide view; lessons about the power of the learning community.

If you want to get started on your own watershed adventure, here’s a good place to begin: http://cfpub.epa.gov/surf/locate/index.cfm 

Or you can just put on your boots and head out the door. Don’t forget the map!

Mapping the community

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One of my grandfathers died when I was not quite two years old. Photographs show me sober-faced and blonde on his lap—but I can’t consciously remember him. As I was growing up, though, I treasured stories about him, souvenirs, evidence of any kind.

I remember a wall covered with maps which my grandfather had joined together, to show a wide area of many towns centered around the Maine farm he and my grandmother bought in the late 30s, when the world seemed to be falling apart. To make this map collage, he had used USGS topographic maps, first bought (pre-farm) for fishing trips, for knowing the ways of brooks and ponds. Tiled together, the maps gave both a huge view, and detailed views–the paths of the largest rivers, and the wiggles of the tiniest brooks, all on the same wall.

Fast forward many years, during which I grew up in a house with more maps on the walls than pictures, and then married a man whose idea of unpacking, after a move across several states, was to open a box labeled MAPS in the middle of the night, and put up a good selection. The Pisgah National Forest on the bathroom door; a map of the known universe on the wall of the dining alcove. Etc. (Some other wife might have been less pleased.)

milford quad smallerFast forward again through several other kinds of work, and find me, eventually, teaching classes of kids from towns all over central Massachusetts and the northern corners of Connecticut and Rhode Island. I wanted to help them know where they were all coming from, and use that as a start for thinking about the worlds we didn’t share and the worlds we did.

It was my husband who said, ‟You could get a whole lot of USGS topo maps.” And it was my memory of my grandfather that said: in a classroom, there are really large walls.

For years, then, a new school year officially began for me when we put the maps back up.

map array smallerI arranged the array of maps, still folded, on a table, and then handed them one by one up to my husband where he stood, somewhat precariously, on a counter below the largest bulletin board space. I folded back the margins to the edge of the map itself; he worked to make the edges of the maps match up as well as possible, so that roads, in red, or brooks, in blue, or town lines, in black, wouldn’t stagger from one map to the next. We marveled again—him from two inches away, perched high; me from the middle of the room—at how much of our relatively urban state was still woods (in green) or swamp (stippled with those funny little swamp symbols.)

Enter students. I usually began, the first week of school, by encouraging kids to compare the map array with the satellite photographs hung nearby. Those big purplish splotches on the maps matched up with cities easily visible from space. The major highways, 9 and 90 and 495 and 290, showed as arteries on the satellite photos also.

But then we zeroed in. If their houses or apartments or condos weren’t too new, and if they didn’t live in downtown Worcester, kids could find on this public document a piece of their private lives: their homes, in the form of tiny black squares. We marked each student’s place with a flag pin specially augmented with page markers, to hold their names.

Here’s most of one year’s map flags:

map array with pins

The kids who lived at the top of the array, up near the ceiling, had to call instructions to a grown-up climber, but the kids down in the nether regions of the Blackstone Valley could stand on a low stool and place their own map flag, sometimes finding the pinprick left by an older brother or sister in a previous year.

Students who lived in city neighborhoods or new houses—or, oftener and oftener, as the years went by, on brand new streets—had to look carefully at nearby streets and intersections, tiny ponds back in the woods, the shapes of hills given away by topographic lines, in order to see and mark where their houses would be. Sometimes it helped to replay the trip home from school: and here we turn left, and that’s where the old drive-in theater is.

Kids whose parents lived in different houses generally chose to mark both. Parents came in during morning sketching, to clarify confusing locations. Other grown-ups wandered by, and pointed out their own landmarks.

As we traced routes between each others’ houses; as we figured out who lived furthest from school, and who closest; as we crossed bridges and followed off-ramps—all of us developed increasing fluency going back and forth between our knowledge of the three dimensional world, and the abstraction of a two dimensional map.

Like a story, a map shows relationships that we didn’t realize before; it also leaves out things we know better than it does. We need the map and the map needs us.

Next post, I think, we use maps to chase rivers. My grandfather would have approved. Andrew working with Topo cropped